UV Nanolasers From ZnO Nanowires

The Evil Dwarf from Hell writes: "This weeks Science has an article on ZnO nanowire base UV lasers, abstract ( paid subscritption required for article). The 70 to 100 nm diameter wires lase at 386nm, line width .3 nm. The growth takes place on a thin Au film on a sapphire surface, and the wires reach lengths of 2 to 10 m. What makes this lasing unusual is it occurs without the use of mirrors. Apparently ZnO forms a natural lasing cavity. (The lasing is optically pumped from a Nd:YAG laser)." The link above is registration-required, but there's another article which describes the whole process.

Comments

Electronic journal comments

[edremy]

The peer review costs money.

Not as much as you might think. We reviewers aren't paid for the reviews: it's regarded as part of our professional responsibility. (The same happens with grant reviews: the vast majority is done by other scientists.)

Many journals charge money to print articles, others charge literally thousands of dollars/year for a subscription. This is a huge bone of contention on many campuses: Professor A and B want the Journal of Obscure Latvian Chemistry at $2000/year, but C and D would rather have Acta Trivia at $2500/year. Academic budgets aren't much- what do you do?

Science and Nature are special cases: there's significant editorial comment in each, and so the costs of printing them are much higher. (The first 3rd of each is quite understandable by any interested layman.)

So why not go electronic? Simple: electronic reserves have a miserable record of longevity. I can and have looked up articles from 1920, and that's hardly the limit. We can't read electronic Pioneer data from the 1960s.

Keeping old journal articles in a format that's always readable is going to cost, and cost big. You'll need multiple servers so that a single crash doesn't kill you, and sysadmins to care for the machines, bandwidth costs, plus format conversion.

And of course, you'll still need to pay for the staff to handle sending articles around for peer review.

Stanford has a program that's looking into solving some of these problems with a distributed system, but it's going to be a long, long time before we abandon paper.

Eric